Conference: The Novel as Theory - 3/20/2025

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Public Humanities and the Novel [00:00:00] Caroline Bailey: Welcome, everyone. My name is Caroline Bailey. I'm a fourth year PhD student in the English Department here at Stanford, and I'm very excited to talk to all of you. I would love it if all of you could introduce yourself with your name, anything you want to say about your professional life, and also tell me about one novel that you've read at some point in your life that you think changed the way that you think. Mark Greif: I'm Mark Greif. I'm an Associate Professor in the English department here at Stanford. I specialize in post-World War II and contemporary fiction, American and globally. And a novel that changed the way that I think was Don DeLillo's White Noise. I read it first in college and at that time, I had the feeling that the novel or fiction [00:01:00] and all of the things that existed in an image world, in a consumer world, you know, on TV or in the supermarket, were somehow in competition. And that was a book that gave me a sense of how daily life transpired, going back and forth between the videos that you would see screened and the things that were right in front of your face. Samir Sellami: Hi. My name is Samir, Samir Sellami. I was living in Germany for some time. I am from Germany also. But now I live in Brazil, where I mostly am doing one thing, which is editing a quite new magazine. We have celebrated our first year recently, and it's called the Berlin Review. And it's a magazine of criticism, essays. We are starting to publish stories now also and literature properly, but the main thing will be criticism, and a novel that changed my [00:02:00] life is definitely Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. I could have mentioned DeLillo too. I was working for my PhD on long books, and in the end I was writing on Bolaño and Pynchon, and DeLillo was one that fell out of the framework because in the end I only wrote about basically two books, but they were very long. And the project was called Hyperbolic Realism. It also came out as a book earlier this year. No, last year. And I think that that defines a bit the spirit of Virginia Woolf's Orlando also. So I really like it just because of the sheer inventiveness of the thing and originality and humor. Caroline Bailey: Awesome. Thank you. Héctor Hoyos: I am Héctor Hoyos, here as the faculty director of the Center for the Study of the Novel. I'm a professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and by courtesy of comparative literature, and I hear names already that I, you know, could totally choose for the novel that rocked my world. [00:03:00] I subscribe to DeLillo, Woolf, Bolaño, and Pynchon. The one I'll add to the mix is Patriotism, by Mishima. And I would urge you to revisit that in this day and age. There's just so much going on there. And I might even add another one, you know, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Tolstoy. That's the kind of thing that, I mean Patriotism, recontextualizes politics and how they're embedded in the flesh, and Ivan Ilyich is just this rumination on death, which is the thing that we all share. We're all going to die. That's our point of agreement here. And so that's -- Mark Greif: Not the only thing. Héctor Hoyos: We agree on other things. We have Thomas Pynchon, which is not nothing. Thank you, Caroline, for having us. Caroline Bailey: Yeah, thank you. So the reason why I started with this opening question about something that changed the way you think is because both Samir and Mark's [00:04:00] talks for our conference tomorrow deal in some way with the novel's engagement in a broader social or political world. And so I wanted to hear you guys talk about, what is the novel's relationship to politics? And because also both of you work in a magazine space or have worked in a magazine space, how does that contrast with a magazine or a serial publication's relationship to our social world and to politics? Mark Greif: Hmm. That's a tough question. Do you want to go first or second? Samir Sellami: Second. Mark Greif: Well, okay, so, you know, the quick thought and, Caroline, you'll have to say if this actually answers what you're asking about, is that, in the present Trump moment, certainly, when I find in the eyes of people I meet, an echo of what I presume is my own expression of bewilderment, stupefaction, confusion, shock, et cetera, [00:05:00] the thing that allows some kind of comprehensive thinking about the experience of hearing the news of immigrant roundups, firings of trans people and so forth is never the news itself or the news report, but rather some kind of inscription in fiction, often from the past, the 19th century or the 18th century of individual characters reacting to similar kinds of shocks. So in that sense, I think the novel is a tool for comprehension in a way that maybe the things that might appear in, you know, periodicals or serials wouldn't be. I do think of small magazines like n+1 and Berlin Review as being much closer to actuality or the moment, and not having [00:06:00] that distant view, let's say. Samir Sellami: Our experience was that in the beginning we started to not make a rule, but a commitment that we wanted to have our reviews have a real topic. So not only what is, there's actually a quite good tradition that is a bit waning. It's getting a bit more complicated because there's less space in the journals, in the newspapers. But there's a good tradition of literary criticism in Germany, and so many people ask us, why are you doing this thing if there's already that thing? And only to say, okay, it's shrinking wasn't enough. We thought that we would want to have texts that approach the novel. It's very often it's novels that are reviewed because that's the kind of still defining genre that we want to have something that is talking about a topic that is not necessarily the [00:07:00] topic of the novel. And I think, I didn't know if that adds to what you said or is maybe just, you know, more or less the same, but I think that criticism and the novel could work together in that sense that they could create an image of a certain actual political moment more than understanding itself as this directly political intervention, which I find often a bit pathetic. Yeah. Caroline Bailey: Interesting. So you think that there is a political space within the, not the review of a novel as well as that essay form. Samir Sellami: Yeah, I think it's just both genres are elaborations of, could be elaborations of a political moment or a political conjuncture or conflict. Caroline Bailey: Mm-hmm. Samir Sellami: And they can work together if the reviewer itself or themselves go about this in the same kind of open [00:08:00] way to articulate something about the novel in conjunction with, also, we also often have novels in conjunction with other genre or, yeah, political moments or what happens in Berlin and so on. So that is basically how I would understand to write a review, always. But it doesn't happen so often. Usually it's just a description of the novel itself, more or less. Well done. And then a kind of judgment if you should read it or buy it. Caroline Bailey: Got it. Samir Sellami: Yeah. Caroline Bailey: Yeah. One of the other questions that I sort of had on this list, it was originally a broader question about, you know, what makes a good essay form, but I'm curious, what makes a good book review essay form? Because it seems to me like a genre, when I've tried to write it, that it feels often sort of like staid and simple where it's like, what am I doing just resummarizing this novel? Am I trying to sell it? Is it fundamentally a commercial genre? Yeah. And when you write these kinds of things what are [00:09:00] you, what are you going for? What do you think people actually want to read? Mark Greif: Yeah. Well, gosh, I think, I mean, it's funny there, I think it's a matter of length, purpose, venue. I mean, as a writer of book reviews at times it's very clear if someone says, will you give me 500 words? You know, paragraph one, something interesting about the book, paragraph two, development from the book, paragraph three, a thought, paragraph four, is it worth reading or not? Caroline Bailey: Yeah. Mark Greif: And, you know, it has a very straightforward kind of consumer function. The other kind of review that does what Samir's describing, seems to me, offers two pleasures. That and satisfactions, you know, that, the description of the book, and some kind of evaluation and then the opportunity to observe someone reacting to the book or experience it, reacting or experiencing it. Yeah. Caroline Bailey: Hmm. Are either of you familiar with the BookTok phenomenon? [00:10:00] Mark Greif: Oh, the BookTok phenomenon? Caroline Bailey: Yeah. Mark Greif: Yeah. Caroline Bailey: Which is often potentially very different than the kinds of books that we're reading, but it's these colloquial reviews of people. And I'm just generally thinking about the pleasure of watching someone else read a book and react to a book. And if that's a fundamental part of our experience of literature or not. Mark Greif: I think it is. There, you actually get the material book. That's, at least to me, the additional satisfaction is seeing the cover and so forth. Yes. Which I guess you get in a New York Times book review, but it's so flat. Caroline Bailey: Yeah. Mark Greif: Three dimensions. Héctor Hoyos: I want to pick up on this idea that a book review, the book review of a novel can be a political act. Mark Greif: Hmm. Héctor Hoyos: Because as you are also pointing out, there's much commercialism -- Caroline Bailey: Mm-hmm. Héctor Hoyos: -- boosterism. There is a way in which book reviews can be anodyne, and if you don't have anything good to say about a book, then don't say anything. Someone else is going to celebrate that book. And at the end of the day, readers [00:11:00] just have to, you know, count how many endorsements you have on one side or on the other. And that's really impoverishing. To bridge the gap between the here and now of n+1 or The Berlin Review and the longue durée, I am reminded of something I just came across in my research. A review, a Chilean review of The General in His Labyrinth, the 1989 historical novel by Gabriel García Márquez, that was a fair review and that criticized what doesn't work in that book. But you kind of have to go to Chile to find it because no one in Colombia, no one in Cuba would dare, probably no one in translation in the US would dare at that point to say something against the great Gabriel García Márquez. Mark Greif: Mm-hmm. Héctor Hoyos: Which had to be said. And when you, you know, go back to that book and you study it and you think about it, it's nice that you have, you know, someone, in this case Ignacio Valente of all people, that name might ring a [00:12:00] bell for some, writing against that novel, The General in His Labyrinth. So it's easy to see how the kind of contingent contemporary work that a literary magazine is doing is rewriting the future. You know, when we come back with unclouded eyes, and we see what was what. Caroline Bailey: How often do you guys turn to reviews when you're writing scholarship on fiction? To what extent is that a part of your research process and why, or why is that important to you and/or why is it not important to you? Mark Greif: That's very interesting. I mean, I, I very rarely turn to reviews of novels that I'm teaching or writing about initially, except, I mean, simply because one wants to have a reading of the book, unclouded by other people's opinions, but especially for contemporary novels, I do find that there's something [00:13:00] essential about going to the reviews as they appeared, you know, at some time during the reading or at the end of it before teaching and so forth. Because there is something that matters so much about the ways in which novels appear for us and often are misapprehended or miscomprehended in reviews. It's certainly my experience in teaching contemporary fiction that I read a novel, I get some sense of what really matters in it, what it's about, and then I read the reviews and always think, God, these people are fools. Or, you know, or they've gotten the book wrong in some deep way. But usually because they've picked up on something else, some other signal about the book. Caroline Bailey: Mm-hmm. Mark Greif: Its cover, its presentation, that first five pages. And so it's essential to know what that looks like, I guess. Well. Caroline Bailey: Yeah. Samir Sellami: I'm thinking about these anthologies of [00:14:00] reviews about Moby Dick, for example, where what, which is, really, captures a historical moment. And it's really interesting to see that and just that these reactions and how they kind of revived the book that was dead at this point. And I think the same thing we could do with contemporary, more hyper-contemporary novels when we read the reviews in a certain way, if the reviews were interesting enough. And I think as, in the moment at, where we are now, most reviews have this commercial, or at least they have this mesosphere character where it's neither a short thing that is really witty, but it's also not a long thing that is really fresh, and so that might be, it depends also on the quality of the reviews and something like this, like an internationalist point of view or very comparatist point of view that doesn't only look at, not, at reviews in English would be interesting in that point. But I, if I'm doing it, I don't know, [00:15:00] I'm doing it intuitively sometimes and sometimes not. So I don't have really a, you know, a working method. And I'm also not writing much scholarship at this point, but if I'm writing a review myself, I usually, I sometimes think now I should read the reviews in order to not say something that they say and say something new. But then in the end, I don't do that often. I think that's a kind of superstitional thing also behind that, but, yeah, just to be more intuitive when I'm writing. Mark Greif: Yeah, I mean, just picking up on your questions, Caroline, what, you know, I'll have to find out what you're really thinking about. But there is a real value, especially in longer reviews, especially the less dutiful the reviewer is in seeing where any one reader's mind goes. So that I often think the most valuable thing is what other books get drafted in by means of comparison or setting the case and so forth. That I feel often tells you much more [00:16:00] about the content of the book under review, but it only happens at, you know, 3,000 or 5,000 words. Caroline Bailey: Yeah. So the kind of comparison that's like, this book is Stephen King meets Gabriel García Márquez? So some kind of, those kinds of comparisons or are you thinking something different? Mark Greif: Less that, less the fantasy football or whatever. More the moment in which someone doesn't know how to explain something and they turn to some often, you know, other body of theory rather than a work, you know? Caroline Bailey: Yeah. Mark Greif: This is really about the white working class or something. And, you know, I'm gonna trot out Arlie Russell Hochschild. Caroline Bailey: Yeah. Mark Greif: Then you're like, ohhh, something is happening in this person's mind that I can witness and compare to the workings of my own mind. Caroline Bailey: Yeah. Yeah. So you said the magic word, which is theory, so -- Mark Greif: Oh no, time to drink. Caroline Bailey: Right. The theme of this conference, right, is the novel as theory. And I often find that theory is [00:17:00] posited as a thing from our discipline that is the discipline of literary criticism that is the least approachable, the least public-humanities friendly, so on and so forth. So potentially, you know, having to define what exactly you think theory is, although you can try to skirt that question if you'd like. Do you think that's a fair assessment about its accessibility to the public or not? Mark Greif: Hmm. You know, under other circumstances I would be tempted to say no in order to try to mount some defense of its centrality, importance, relevance, et cetera. But if I can just assume its centrality, importance, relevance, and fun, right? Caroline Bailey: Mm-hmm. Mark Greif: Let's assume that's all done. Yeah, in working on this talk, I do find myself reminded at the difficulty of theory precisely because of its degree of abstraction always from cases which you have in common. Caroline Bailey: Mm-hmm. Mark Greif: And I find myself over and over again [00:18:00] in trying to take different kinds of theories, theories of the novel, theories of society, theories of action, et cetera, and put them together in some coherent arrangement of stepping back and saying, oh, shoot. Theory of action in this context is trying to figure out an answer to this problem about motivation, behavior, et cetera. Theory of the novel, oh, well, I don't mean the historical theories of the emergence of the novel. I mean, reader response theories of how we can assess people's immediate reaction and consequence, let's say, so that it really does become a kind of giant muddle, or something that requires the expectation that in a room you're dealing with people who have many of these things already in mind, and thus are prepared to put the tinker toy pieces together in a successful way. But I do think always this abstracting function as opposed to saying, let's talk about The Sorrows of Young Werther, and everybody's like, oh, yeah, let's talk about it, [00:19:00] does make it difficult certainly, and less easy to retail outside the, you know, the precincts of a university department. Caroline Bailey: Yeah. Héctor Hoyos: I want to slide in a question having to do with n+1 being a source of inspiration for The Berlin Review. We've got to put that on the table. Yesterday, Samir and I mentioned that felicitous coinage of “the intellectual situation.” Mark Greif: Oh yeah. Héctor Hoyos: That led to the opening of n+1, the opening gambit as it were. At the same time, I can imagine how n+1 was inspired in something that happens more in Europe or South America than in the US, which is namely an intellectual life outside of a university. Right? I hope that going on record saying that is not, you know, too [00:20:00] gauche, but there are conversations you can have with, I don't know, taxi drivers in Buenos Aires that are unique because there's just this whole tradition of non-professional competent readers. So, you know, this is just an invitation for the two of you to, to think about that, you know, what is, what is the place of the non-academic of academics within the non-academic, and what do we do with something like the public humanities now? And Mark, you've been involved with that at Stanford that has come into its own in the last few years. And I can see how there are arguments, you know, that are very much in favor because it's good for democracy that you have informed conversations. You could also, you know, think that there are things that are not so great about the public humanities if that means that things like theory are not going to make it across, they're not going to be part of the conversation because you cannot [00:21:00] really water it down. Right? That perhaps being just a little polemical. So what are your feelings or thoughts about this whole conundrum? Samir Sellami: Yeah, that's a good one. I don't know where to start. I just thought about two different things, but maybe they come together. I often thought of, I don't know if my friend and colleague Tobias, who's mostly co-editing with me and a group of other people who come and go as additional amazing collaborators has the same issue. But I often think about how we can do this without being too, I would say, elitist because there is a certain elitism in it that comes from the length and the difficulty, and also the nicheness of some of the topics and phenomena that we're looking at. And we certainly don't want to be mainstream, otherwise we would do something else. So [00:22:00] maybe when you talk about this appealing intellectual life outside of academia, there's something, there's an appeal, there's a style of being, of talking and also talking about theory that has gotten a bit out of fashion. But in the eighties and the nineties and Berlin was I think an interesting place, not as vibrant as Paris maybe, but it was actually, it was definitely a place of theory reception and a theory reception outside of academic circles that also had a heavily politicized dimension. And it's not, our idea is not to recreate that moment, but I think that a certain style or a certain appeal, or a certain aesthetics also that we kind of take up from the, in parentheses, breaks, from the streets is I [00:23:00] think a certain kind of, yeah, magnet to start thinking about more difficult things and draw people in. And I think the resonance to some of our texts shows that they sounded a bit niche or they sounded a bit complicated, but they were actually receptive. They were actually read by more people than others that were a review of a big name or so. Mark Greif: Yeah, I mean, I have more that will reinforce what you're saying. Saying, I think, Samir too, in the approach. My answer will either be complicated or just confusing. And it goes back to that business of the intellectual situation at the beginning of n+1. I mean, I remember when we decided that we wanted to start having this initial kind of leader or, you know, quasi editorial, but something that would be staged as if from the point of view of a person who was just walking around a city and encountering different things. And being confused [00:24:00] by them. And that's fallen out over time. But that prospect of really picking up an urban experience of saying, why does that building look like that? And what do I get from the magazine in front of me? And why, you know, why is my soda bottle talking to me so loquaciously. This just happened on the airplane. I got, the water seems to be called Bubly. You know, and you can't open the tab of it without reading, like, "Enjoy your water!" You know, this kind of thing. I mean, this is odd, right? Initially the idea was to pick up that experience somehow in writing and in a critical register, let's say. But also, you know, there was the inspiration in your question, Héctor, of the idea of some world that had existed previously maybe and didn't anymore of a kind of intellectual life that wasn't locked in universities. And I remember even that name, “intellectual situation,” you know, which in a way is quite old fashioned or harkened back to something [00:25:00] from the mid 20th century, you know? For me, it tied to the kinds of titles and subheads that Partisan Review used. And I thought, oh, Partisan Review, that was a time when there were New York intellectuals who weren't just bound to institutions and universities and they made this journal and so forth. Reading through the archive of Partisan Review subsequently, I remember being a little disillusioned by the discovery of a poll of their subscribers that they did in the fifties, which showed that all of these people, these general intellectuals and public humanities readers, who were subscribing to the magazine, in fact were 90%, I think, connected to universities, museums, institutions in one way or another of kind of professional arts and culture. But the best explanation in some way of why Partisan Review still seemed different to people, in reading about the kind of culture of the magazine and even the information they got on their [00:26:00] readers, was that it was a place in which people who had some dimension of school culture, institutional culture, et cetera, even in their breadwinning could, as it were, take off the robes of state, and this is the intellect you do in your off time. Héctor Hoyos: Mm-hmm. Mark Greif: Or this is the other world somehow. And that I think in the US especially does feel like the thing that one is hoping for because it feels as if there's less of a world not bound by these particular institutions of where you make your living. And that possibility of a kind of crossing space, even if the energy for it is coming from university, museum, I don't know, ad agency, law firm, et cetera, is the space in which you have some more general conversation. Caroline Bailey: It's interesting. I remember you once told me that subscribers are the lifeblood of a magazine, right? If you don't have subscribers or a subscriber [00:27:00] base, then what are you doing? And it's interesting because just technologically speaking, I'm wondering if at a certain point in time that was a means of creating a community that's now moved online to things like, you know, why do you need a subscriber base as a community if you have Reddit? Or like these super, you know, fast response kind of things, how do you go about building a subscriber base to begin with? What is it that you look for and is that an active process? Are you seeking out a certain kind of person if you don't want to have this moment where you realize it's all just the same people you were talking to anyway in your working life that are reading your magazine? Yet to what extent do you try to consciously shape that or not? Héctor Hoyos: For our listeners, we are sitting here in a pantry and our two guests are reaching over for the secret sauce. They have it in their hands right now. Mark Greif: Yes, yes, secret sauce. Samir Sellami: But we won't tell you that. [00:28:00] One thing that came to my mind was in the beginning I was sometimes joking. I don't know if it's a joke actually, that we are going to be, or we want to be a niche magazine where the niche is the generalization and that makes the description or definition of the subscriber base hard, but at the same time, not so hard because we are just, we, because it may, it helps us to create a certain content that we think is good enough and interesting enough and special enough to legitimate this call for people who are going to pay us, even if at six euro per month, where we are now at the basic level of subscription is for a completely independent magazine with no state or so on funding, almost no funding from the state, [00:29:00] a pretty good price, I think. But that is not what I wanted to say, actually. I wanted to say it was interesting to see how we co-created a small but consistent subscription, subscriber base from the beginning. And then kind of with the small data we have, because we don't collect a lot of data, to see who that is. So the main thing that is interesting, how many people are not in Berlin, and there are some people, and it's interesting that and this allows you to think of an idea, okay, let's maybe do three events in Berlin and then do one event in the province, in the so-called province in Eastern Germany. That is something that we would want to do anyways because we are interested in that, but it's maybe something that we wouldn't do if we see that all of our subscribers live in big cities, most of them in Berlin. But the first batch of subscribers gave us this idea that it's actually much more [00:30:00] differentiated than we thought. And so I think that's a, that there is a kind of reciprocal process between these more objective things, like who is where and how old are these people? I don't know actually if we know that, but I think we can see that from the name sometimes. So if we have a Margaret Schneider, she might be a bit older than Dustin something. So, and then we can think about, yeah, so maybe that also helps us to create a more diverse content. And so I see it as a back and forth between these questions that seem less content based, but in the end, are. Mark Greif: Yeah, I wonder if you have the same experience with Berlin Review, you know, for subscribers, they're very valuable of course, because they pay money. I mean, I think this is what I was saying to you before, but for small magazines, they're valuable in a different way. And quite important because especially now with the internet, they're [00:31:00] the people who you can expect or hope will read more than one article. You know, it's characteristic of small magazines. I think that you think at the level or at the unit of the magazine and the fantasy is always, could you get a reader to start in the beginning and read the entire thing or just to find all the articles interesting. Or to see that from the point of view of the reader, they are experiencing what you have from the point of view of the editor, the sense that actually all of these articles are talking to one another and that the experience of reading any one changes under the influence of the others, something that's not necessarily associated with the newspaper and magazines closer to a newspaper form, or with, I don't know, a variety of other experiences in which you just get single stories. That said, the great bummer of the internet is to discover, often with very large traffic numbers, one [00:32:00] gets a kind of people coming to a single article and I hear this complaint from everyone I know in magazines, rather than for the magazine itself. You know, and you'll hear, you'll meet someone and they'll say, oh, I read this great article. And you'll say, oh, yes, that was in our publication. And they'll say, oh, I've never heard of it, your publication, you know, whereas there's a kind of special value just for hope and optimism in wanting to continue to do it in the prospect of just anybody who's committed enough to have to deal with the thing as a bundle. So how you actually get the subscribers is different. Then I think you get very sneaky. Insofar as, you know, I remember in the early days, you know, maybe still, just hiding copies of the magazines, different places, keeping it in your backpack and you know, at every cafe trying to slip a copy in the bookstores that you go to, to browse new things, making sure that they stock it, stuff like that. It's very much, [00:33:00] brick and mortar, let's say. Caroline Bailey: Yeah. It was interesting, both of you also have talked about, the cityscape. Obviously Berlin Review is named after Berlin and you talked about the intellectual life of Berlin, and I might be incorrect in assuming this, but I do feel like there's a tie between n+1 and New York City. Mark Greif: Yep, yep. Caroline Bailey: And it's very much founded in that culture. And I had an interesting experience recently where a friend found a self-published, a kind of magazine in a certain cafe in LA, but was actually upset by this because he viewed it as evidence of gentrification. Mark Greif: Huh. Caroline Bailey: So this is sort of an abstract question, but kind of going off of what you just said about brick and mortar stores and cafes and having it physically on your person how does the magazine take up space in the city? How is it embodied in the life of an urban center? And potentially one urban center in particular. Mark Greif: Mm-hmm. Great question. Samir Sellami: Mm-hmm. [00:34:00] Mark Greif: I mean, well, I'll start just 'cause it follows what I was saying before to Héctor's question too, or I don't, well, it's everybody's question now. It's eternity's question now, right? About the cab driver, right? With whom you're discussing, you know, a museum or something like that. I have the feeling that the special thing about cities is not necessarily that there's a magical realm of people who have no attachments, but love culture, right? But rather it's the place in which people with lots of individual attachments get shoved up against all the other people. And so wind up exchanging, and spending this semester in New York again, I just have the feeling, which you can't quite have here at Stanford, of being very happily mashed into other people on the subway and thus seeing what they're reading and seeing what they're texting on their phones, you know, or going, I mean, this is important [00:35:00] too, going to a bar or a bookstore or you know, any venue that will give you free space to do an n+1 event. As, you know, well, this just happened this past week, and discovering that in the corner there are people doing tarot readings, you know, and then in the other corner, well they, you know, they came a little later, there was a group from CUNY actually on social practice art, right? And suddenly there are all these artists around and one has the opportunity to say, oh, why, you know, why is that, tell me why what you're doing is art in your world and so forth. Gosh, I actually forget the origin from which I launched into this peroration on the value of accident and being mashed together. But I do take it, you know, if the magazine itself is a form in which you are putting side by side things which might belong to kind of individual departments, right? These are the book reviews, these are the essays, the articles, and so forth. The ideal of it really is something like the insistence on yoking together things that otherwise seem disparate and cities [00:36:00] will give you that experience every day. Samir Sellami: I don't know if I have a big thing to add, but I'm thinking about, you have this moment of where, where we're at in the moment of gentrification, we're certainly already post- in a post- moment, in a post- world of where, where many places that were once, had an appeal of being underground, independent, autonomous, you name it, are now gentrified and are now already co-opted by something much more severe. When you look at, at the presence of Elon Musk's factory in close to Berlin and the Amazon Tower that they're building. That's, so it's not that these kind of hipster, artsy moves are now on the forefront of [00:37:00] gentrification where we have something much, much darker. That doesn't mean that we're not, could not be co-opted or not, maybe also a force of gentrification. But I think we are more in the moment where we should critically reflect these developments. And, but, therefore, that politicizes us necessarily. I mean, I think when we started to think about the Review, which is sometime three or four years ago, maybe even longer, maybe more recently. It depends how you define thinking about it. And when we started last year, there was certainly a radical political shift from where we were more focusing on how do we get all the, these talented people that are, most of them not, don't have a university position, that we know and are amazing writers, but they get 150 euros for a book review by the newspapers. How do we get them into an economy that will in the end also pay them significantly more? [00:38:00] Which we already do, but we are not there. We are not yet there where we would want to be with fees, but we're also, they feel like kind of a community and a force that is really articulating these things in a consistent way. And then Gaza happened, you know? Caroline Bailey: Mm-hmm. Samir Sellami: And I don't think that we got totally off the track, but it definitely changed the design and the whole setup of the magazine. So, I think at this point we are more in this observer position. Caroline Bailey: Mm-hmm. Samir Sellami: But, yeah. Héctor Hoyos: I think that there must be objective ways to measure how the culture industry, let's say a loose sense of the culture industry in a place like Berlin, has a role in standing in the way of gentrification. Because there the people that maybe read your [00:39:00] magazine, that go to certain cafes, that inhabit the city in a certain way, who are also the people that, you know, put their bodies in line when they want to turn a major city park into a semi-private development, right? These sound like very privileged struggles sometimes. But they are also actual struggles. And if, if they did not come to happen, then you would have these parks turned into a private, you know, a suburb, like the one we do live in here in California. It has to be said, you know? Where the Amazons and the Teslas of the world have coalesced. That's also something to think about. I wanted to say, maybe a question having to do with, there are, there is of course an n+1 city, it was a Partisan Review city. There is a Berlin Review city, obviously. How about, and I know people have spoken about this, the n+1 novel, or the Berlin Review novel. I mean, [00:40:00] how, again, connecting with the novel as theory, are you creating the criteria for certain aesthetic phenomena? And some of your editors may have already participated in that very directly in the case of the more senior magazine, right? But any thoughts about that? Mark Greif: Sure. Oh, well, they've emerged, n+1 novels, and even kind of novels, which somehow typify the early phase. And so Elif Batuman's, two novels, you know, the first one is, I mix them up. Is the first one The Idiot, the second one Either/Or? When I read those books, you know, and she was a contributor from issue, the second issue on, I think, oh actually these are novels that are very much of the experience behind creating the magazine. This sense that one is dominated [00:41:00] by thoughts of Dostoyevsky while, you know, fixing a chicken salad sandwich or whatever. And that trying to live both in the world of the imagination and the world of actuality is tough and complicated by the fact actually of school dominating everything. You know, those really are kind of school books. And of course she did a PhD here in the, not the English department, but in literature. That said, insofar as that represents something like a type, it, it's depressing sometimes when I read other things and think, oh, this work of fiction, too, somehow falls into that type. And I don't know what more to say than that, but I guess, or else it's, you know, an aspect of self-contempt, that whenever one sees oneself or a magazine or a community crystallized successfully, one only wants to see it happen [00:42:00] once, and ever after, you think, oh, what else is going to happen? Samir Sellami: But are you asking the, also the question of taste? I mean, is that a kind of, a taste question or -- Héctor Hoyos: However, you take it in any direction. Samir Sellami: I was really, I think more excited than irritated by the fact that, how many of authors, we either review or publish, for example, I wrote my first Berlin Review piece about Elif Batuman, so that counts, they find a certain resonance in other, let's say for example, independent publishers, that I liked or like, and then discover better. But for example, there's one example I can give you, which is the amazing independent publisher in Brazil called Todavia, and they have a really, Claudia Durastanti and Adania Shibli, [00:43:00] a series of writers that they published that we also publish without, I didn't know that they're doing this. And so there was also this kind of recognition of resonance that I found in other publications. As we said that, as you'd also already mentioned, the intellectual situation. Whenever we write an editorial, which is not that often, we often ask, we are like, okay, what are we doing now? And then some of us ask the question, what is the intellectual situation? So that is kind of, it sounds a bit esoteric maybe, but these things, I think they create a certain kind of resonance beyond your own universe, and just to see that other people are doing something similar, which is not the same and they're not doing it because there is some agent telling them they are doing that, so you have to do it. That's a cool thing. And I think that is also, that has maybe also to do [00:44:00] with people that have, share a certain taste, but have also tastes that are outside of this closed space or that I'm not constructing this closed space and can always put some energy into that still kind of open system. Yeah. Mark Greif: Yeah. I mean, you have to believe too that fiction travels differently and has different effects. You know, something I hear from the current editors in chief is a frustration, and I remember it myself. It's always the feeling, how come nobody talks about our weird fiction? Because in any kind of mixed publication where you have fiction running alongside reviews and essays, it's the essays that get talked about, right? Or taken up somehow. And for us also, weird fiction is always the category because, starting out and still, we couldn't quite call it experimental fiction because it seemed like that would actually lock us into a particular kind of formal frame. But the goal always was to keep things weird, right? With the hope that indeed you're publishing things that are going to mess with people's [00:45:00] minds or change fiction, how it's done and so forth. I think though that the commitment to it is the sense that actually, as long as people are reading it, it is reaching in and shaking their brains, you know, or massaging or squeezing in a way that the essays don't. And you have to have this faith that even though the things aren't as immediately explicable, interpretable, or talk-aboutable, right? They don't invite commentary in the immediate moment, that if other people are like, you know, yourself, they really do something different and necessary. Caroline Bailey: Yeah. There's something weird there because I perceive of the novel as being eminently talk-aboutable. Mark Greif: Mm-hmm. Caroline Bailey: In the sense of the book club, right, as such to this huge thing. Mark Greif: Yeah. Caroline Bailey: And it's then a running joke that I feel like you'll hear in certain departments of certain English classes that they are book-club-style classes, which implies perhaps that there's something intellectually less serious about them. Mark Greif: Mm-hmm. Caroline Bailey: But also maybe implies that the discussion is [00:46:00] sort of really good and natural. And so it's interesting to hear that because it almost implies that essays and novels are talk-aboutable, but short stories somehow fall into this awkward gap there where it's hard for people, hard for people to connect to them in the same way, unless you think it's an issue of your readership. Your readership is really just more interested in essays than they are stories. Mark Greif: I don't blame the readership. Caroline Bailey: Okay. Mark Greif: I mean, there is something about the short story and often the great short story that, it has the character of a fragment or a scene or a sketch. I also do think there is something particular about the fiction we've tried to publish in that, you know, I'm supposed to be a professional talking about fiction and so forth, and I do it in the classroom, and I feel I could do it, well, you know, for many of the stories that are published in bigger magazines, with n+1 stories that are the ones that become, you make us think, oh, that's an n+1 story. [00:47:00] There is this effect in which I read it and I just say, did you see that thing? Did you read that? What the fuck was that? Forgive me. Microphone. That’s actually the desire. Well. Caroline Bailey: Yeah. I'm curious, Samir, because you said that the Berlin Review is going to start publishing short fiction, but you haven't necessarily yet. Samir Sellami: We have. So we have invented this, this platonic ontology -- Caroline Bailey: Okay. Samir Sellami: -- of three genres, which is reviews -- that's clear -- essays, and then there's a third genre, which is everything that is political commentary, corónica, we would say, in the Latin American tradition. And this became, to come back to something I said before, this became a much more important genre than what we said before. And we, but we also realized that there are many things that don't really fit in into each of them. I mean, often they [00:48:00] fit in very well and help us also define these genres in a good way or make sense. Because there's also, there're also memos that are very long. So it's not only that the long reads, in the beginning, I thought, ah, maybe we should just call the long reads “long reads,” you know? Mark Greif: Mm-hmm. Samir Sellami: Because that was also one of the things that we wanted to do, really to introduce long reads into a German publishing, into a project that publishes quite regularly that is not a literary magazine that is financed by the Akademie der Künste, for example. But something more closely to, of course, the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books. So we thought that we should maybe emphasize that long character. But then we, it turned out we have reviews that are 5,000 words long, and we have essays that are maybe 1,700 words long. But now, the next, so we publish online and then we gather the best, what we published and some new stuff [00:49:00] into a reader, into a magazine, published magazine. And we will publish our third one soon, and there will be a significant amount of fiction, I think three texts at least, that qualify as fiction in the sense that we're thinking about in the moment. So we thought we maybe now introduce a fourth genre, the story genre. Yeah, that is, yeah. Caroline Bailey: Yeah. I love the idea of qualifying as fiction as the story, the story applies to a job and meets certain qualifications, also because we were talking about Batuman and, whatever, people are very up in arms about autofiction at the moment. But anyway, I like that idea a lot. Do you have another question? Héctor Hoyos: Our time might, might be coming up, but is there anything that we want to get on the table? Meaning a possible question we can edit away, you know, this portion might not be in the in the podcast, but something that we want to close with. Mark Greif: What was your [00:50:00] overall agenda? Caroline Bailey: The only question that I have on here, that I was like, I don't know if this is going to throw people through too much of a loop. Mark Greif: Mm-hmm. Caroline Bailey: Which, both of you guys in your bios often talk about the avant garde. So I was going to ask if there was an avant garde. Mark Greif: Mm-hmm. Caroline Bailey: I sort of wanted to ask if Bohemia was dead. Do you think everything that you were saying about the city in the nineties and, yeah, I think those two are pretty related questions. Héctor Hoyos: I have a kindred question. Caroline Bailey: Okay. Héctor Hoyos: So Pascale Casanova, the great late critic, one of the last things that she wrote was about pacified versus combative literatures; the pacified being subject to agents and blurbs and the market and the struggles for recognition don't ever really happen. Or if they do, they're just within this closed system, but there's not outsiders breaking in anymore. There's no, outside of this all-encompassing market. Do you see that [00:51:00] happening? Are we in a pacified time? Mark Greif: Oh, Héctor. What a difficult question to ask. But partly a difficult question because of fiction. So just off the cuff, fiction does feel more pacified at this moment than any other domain of even writing that I can think of, which I think is partly why, you know, Paris Review started quietly adding nonfiction and so forth. Some kind of hybrid of immediacy. And the real and fictional technique seems to be more combative at the moment than the more traditional forms of fiction. And also the classically more experimental, avant garde, difficult, more avant garde modes. And that's [00:52:00] confusing actually, that it doesn't seem to be solely a matter of institutionalization and market. That is to say, writing, which is officially experimental, combative, avant garde, et cetera at the moment seems to me similarly pacified in a funny way, in fictional writing, and I don't quite know why. But it would, yes, you know, who, besides, who am I to disagree with Pascale Casanova? Yeah, but that's just an intuitive response. Samir Sellami: I know it might help to think, what is even more pacified to make us feel better. And that's maybe, I think that's the global art world, presented by the Biennale frenzy, I don't know how to put it. And yet there is artwork still, artworks that are produced even inside of this, [00:53:00] yeah, completely broken ecology that are life giving, I think. And that's still this, I mean, for me, maybe I'm, because I'm younger than you guys, I think a little bit, at least, for me, the last years felt a bit more exciting, as if there was a bigger liberty that people take, at least in the German book market, both publishers and writers. But, of course, the overall economy of the thing makes it hard to go to the end sometimes, but I think there's still enough competitiveness left in the system that just has to be found and accelerated in a way. Yeah, but maybe that's too prophetic to think about that, in that, on those terms. Héctor Hoyos: I think, Caroline, you should close, but I just want to do [00:54:00] one tiny thing and then leave it for you to close. If you would indulge this question, Samir, how do you say magazine in Spanish or in Portuguese? Samir Sellami: Oh. You know, you hit me with, let me think. Revista. Héctor Hoyos: How do you say it in German? Samir Sellami: Well, Magazin or eine Zeitschrift. Héctor Hoyos: Yes. Thank you. Thank you for indulging that. So where I was going with this is, you would say in Spanish or in Portuguese journal or magazine with the same word, revista. Mark Greif: Mm-hmm. Héctor Hoyos: And that has to do with processes of professionalization, the establishment of learned societies where you have to distinguish, you know, the journal from the magazine. It was really interesting to see how, you know, professionalization is not a one-way street. It's not driven by a center into the periphery and full stop. We read very high [00:55:00] quality pieces these days in magazines, revistas, not journals, revistas. And you know, I just wanted to point that out. Caroline Bailey: Awesome. Alright, well thank you all so much for coming. We're all really looking forward to hearing from you guys tomorrow as well at our conference. Yeah. Mark Greif: Thank you, Caroline. Samir Sellami: Thank you. Caroline Bailey: Alright.